


They did it

by aryastark_valarmorghulis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, First War with Voldemort, Lie Low At Lupin's (Harry Potter), M/M, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Non-Linear Narrative, Sex, Smut, a lot of it, spans multiple eras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-04-12 09:50:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19129597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aryastark_valarmorghulis/pseuds/aryastark_valarmorghulis
Summary: Sex, 1976-1995"They did it in silence because naming love out loud is hard, they did it because they feared being doomed, they did it because they were nineteen and wanted to fly further than the night closing in on them."





	They did it

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my precious Beta D, to S for the encouragement and, of course, to the [Fix It](https://fixitfest.tumblr.com/) mods for running this fest!

 

They did it.

They did it on the scratched linoleum floor of Sirius’ flat and against walls in piss-smelling alleys, gasps escaping their mouths in white puffs, the cheap thrill of being caught tingling through Remus’ spine.

They did it on the groaning couch in a suspended stupor, losing and picking up rhythm over and over, half-drunk and stoned, testing a choreography neither of them ever rehearsed before, bumping noses and bending knees and slipping feet.

They did it on the wobbly kitchen table, Remus’ body bent in previously only imagined angles, sweaty hands gripping the Formica edges, eyes watering, full of desire and need and Sirius.

They did it on the brushwood, the greensward a soiled bed, leaves whispering in their secret idiom around them, kissing to wipe away the blood from their mouths, dirt caked under their fingernails and at the back of their knees.

They did it quickly, locked in James’ and Lily’s bathroom, whimpers muffled in each other’s robe-clad shoulders, and slowly, Remus’ back pressed against the glass of their shower stalls, steaming hot and wet, Sirius’ dark head between his legs blurry with condensation.

They did it to fend off ghosts, an ancestral propitiatory magic ritual, an antidote to the danse macabre currently on stage, and they did it because as long as they were inside one another, the war was banished outside.

They did it until their skin was bruised like over-ripe fruits after a hailstorm and they did it tender and reverent, holding their limbs carefully like precious kintsugi artwork.

They did it in silence because naming love out loud is hard, they did it because they feared being doomed, they did it because they were nineteen and wanted to fly further than the night closing in on them.

 

CAMDEN, 1978.

A new flat, a new chapter, the post-Hogwarts world slowly unfolding in its dangerous yet thrilling freedom, Remus reluctant to leave school and its false sense of security.

But that first summer spent shuttling back and forth between Sirius’ flat in Saffron Hill and his dad’s cottage near Brecon, Remus finds out wizarding society is remarkably small.

It’s the usual seventh-year crowd, just a bit lost, let loose in the real world like the real adults they aren’t. He doesn’t make new friends waiting tables and washing dishes at the little pub in Newtown – the first and only job he found –, but he clutches his old ones close to his chest, the only treasures he cares about.

On a late August evening, a frisson in the air warning him of the forthcoming summer decline, his canvas shoes stomp on the slimy pavement of Kirby Street, almost springing into a proper run.

Sirius is hosting a party at his flat, and his posh drawl echoes in Remus’ mind, _You’ll be late, Moony, why don’t you quit, you’ll find a better job, and in the meantime, Prongs and I can help you_.

Remus didn’t quit, because even in his eighteen-year-old naivety, he has the hunch he won’t get many jobs related to the eight NEWTs he graduated with. Still, he runs on the streets like a character out of a Nouvelle vague movie, because his friends are a fiery comet in the pit of deteriorating events that wizarding England is falling into. Every moment spent without them seems wasted.

Sirius’ flat is packed despite the illegal Extension Charms Lily and James cast, the music blasted at a less than respectable yelling point between too loud to talk and too low to flinch, and Remus is in his not-so-patchy jeans and Talking Heads t-shirt.

He expects to find Sirius busy flirting with some girl or boy – there are a lot of people he barely recognizes, friends of friends, mostly: even the Prewett brothers came, with Benjy and Dearborn, and Emmeline Vance is here too.

Remus’ guts clench when he ends up in Caradoc’s line of sight, but he doesn’t feel confident enough to go talk to him, at least not without alcohol involved.

He tumbles into giddy semi-darkness, barely picking up the hazy chatter over the roar of music, the walls almost rattling in synch with the bass’ thumping.

Remus grabs a beer from the kitchen counter and watches Lily and Frank swaying madly, arms wide in the air in a drunken imitation of Kate Bush, taking turns at twirling and dipping Alice. James and Peter wave frantically at him from the sofa.

“Finally!” Remus startles, his back colliding against someone.

When Sirius curls his broad arms across Remus’ chest, he forgets about Caradoc.

“Did you miss us terribly at work?” Sirius screams against his ear, and Remus laughs, but when he twists his neck to look at him, his heart chirps loudly in his ribcage.

It stuns him, as it always does, how handsome Sirius is, how effortlessly charming he looks outside of his Hogwarts uniform, all unbrushed hair, stubbled angular jaw, in a loose thrift-store t-shirt.

“A little!” he yells back, and they both smile.

Perfectly sober for once, they share  _a look._

“Come with me!” Sirius mouths in his ear, and then he’s ploughing through Dorcas and Marlene, stepping over Mary and a couple of her Ravenclaw friends on the suspended staircase. He never looks back to check if Remus is following, not once, and his confidence would be irritating, really, if it weren’t wholly justified.

The tiny bedroom is surprisingly free of snogging couples.

Sirius doesn’t waste time, leans in to lick the seam of his parted lips, pushes up his t-shirt and holds Remus’ bare waist with both hands, sparking desire through his body. They rock together to Robert Plant screaming he wants to give every inch of his love and Remus drops to his knees, inelegant but eager. He still hasn’t mastered the flick that pops open a button, but for once, he only chuckles at his own clumsiness.

Not often he allows himself the luxury of wanting so openly, but tonight, tonight he takes all he can get, the party downstairs and them upstairs, higher than the rest of the world with the foolishness of youth.

They don’t talk about it later, but what is love, Remus thinks, if not looking up at waning rays of dusk painting stripes of gold on Sirius’ angular face while he sucks his cock.

 

SOHO, 1979.

A few months later, after a blissfully uneventful stakeout in Knockturn Alley. A stroke of luck, since lately people get injured even on those apparently harmless missions.

By now, Remus isn’t blushing anymore or clumsily gagging or striving not to moan too loudly. Still not fluent at dirty talk, tonight he begs Sirius to give it to him nonetheless, and Sirius is always eager to please.

“Hey, Moony. How many people have you slept with?”

Remus sighs heavily against Sirius’ collarbone, cheek plastered to his shoulder, more for show than out of genuine annoyance: it’s only one of the games they play to rile each other up.

Gentle fingers are scratching his scalp, soothing and almost hypnotic, and Remus bites a little into Sirius shoulder, skin smooth and sweat-salty.

“Ah, let me think… five,” he lies.

“Five? Are you sure you weren’t drunk and seeing double?” The resonance of Sirius’ soft laugh vibrates under Remus’ fingers, splayed on his chest: he’s not at all jealous, of course, until he will be.

“I wasn’t drunk at all,” Remus answers, slowly sliding down the familiar planimetry of Sirius’ body, that he loves to map like the most devoted of cartographers. He settles, face over Sirius’ flat belly, chin almost stroking the dark trail of hair leading to his spent prick.

“Well, there’s you, obviously,” he starts to recount. “Then Elaine… I met her one night at the bookstore in Newtown – she was looking for a copy of _Our Bodies, Ourselves_ – we did it in her car later. I never saw her again, but it was so good.”

Remus isn’t many things, but he claims to understand the basics of storytelling, so he reckons this is the right moment for a pause: he must give Sirius time to ruminate over each one of the sentences he’s carefully arranging in his mind, building up a crescendo.

“And the other three?” Sirius asks, spreading his legs a bit in a very unsubtle hint.

"Well, I would tell you about Caradoc, but there’s nothing you don’t know from, er, first-hand experience.”

“Do me a favour and don’t remind me,” Sirius spats.

Remus smiles against his pubic hair, lowering his face enough to inhale the faint tang of sweat and spunk that he learned to associate with sex and with nights and days and afternoons spent in their bed.

“It’s not  _my_ fault if  _you_ didn’t like shagging him… maybe you didn’t do it right?” Remus presses, gleefully delighted by the aggravated growl that his teasing remark tears from Sirius’ throat. He tries to soothe him, placing a close-mouthed kiss at the base of his hardening prick, and there’s nothing he loves more in this quickly blackening world that having Sirius all revved up and hanging from his mouth.

“I’ll show you  _right…_ and I’m so glad he finally mastered an Engorgement Charm on his bits, good for him.”

Remus stifles a laugh: the whole thing had actually lasted a total of five underwhelming minutes and after, it had been vaguely embarrassing to lock eyes with Caradoc, but of course Remus doesn’t correct Sirius. He wants him to wallow in a little pool of groundless jealousy for a while.

“And the fourth?” Sirius prompts him.

Remus licks at the warm skin on the inside of his thigh, nosing at the full hardness of his cock, and only when Sirius tugs impatiently at his hair, he deems him worthy of an answer.

“Oh, fourth and fifth together, Emmeline and Benjy. We did it at her house. It’s not easy when there’s two, but… you know, it was worth it...” he trails off suggestively, only to witness the ways Sirius falls apart.

It’s a lie, invented on the spot and inspired by an off-handed remark made by Emmeline and Benjy that had the juvenile attention of all the younger members of the Order. It’s priceless to see Sirius fisting the sheets, a flush spreading over his cheeks and neck, forehead creased with a single, vertical line.

It could be jealousy, it could be simple arousal or a mix of both, Remus can’t tell, and it doesn’t matter anyway. He got Sirius exactly where he wants him, hard and spread wide open and focused on nothing but Remus’ mouth.

The unsexy truth is that there isn’t a fifth, and the fourth was a hasty handjob from an older man in a public toilet near Pond Square, but Sirius doesn’t need to know.

That isn’t what matters, because Sirius is yanking his hair and tugging him up, kissing him breathless, all tongue and spit and teeth, before flipping them over, pressing Remus’ wrists into the mattress.

This, also, is exactly where he wanted Sirius.

“Oh, really,” Sirius bites at his jaw. “And pray tell, what  _exactly_ did you do? Did Benjy fuck you from behind while you ate Emmeline out? Or what, they took turns with you? I bet you only watched them shagging, didn’t you? Discreetly touching yourself, not even making a sound, all too frightened to be asked to join.”

Remus laughs against his cheek, because it’s marvellous, getting him so feverishly worked up: Sirius Black is, in fact, affected by jealousy. Remus doesn’t dream of confirming nor denying, hooking an ankle up to his shoulder instead.

“I don’t know, which option turns you on the most?" He asks, but it comes out as a plea, a whimper.

Sirius already has his fingers inside of him, Remus still slick from before.

"But you were my first,” the words flee from his slack mouth as Sirius slides inside, an unwilling confession of truth.

Sirius fucks him rough and fast, lifting his hips from the mattress and slapping his arse, and then slow and intimate, noses touching, kissing and stroking and praising, making it all a huge show-off of prowess, trying harder and harder to make this the best fuck of their lives, because he’s the most arrogant, vain bastard that’s ever walked the earth.

Remus is furiously besotted, and he longs for nothing more than to indulge him, spreading his thighs further, gripping his ass hard enough to bruise, begging shamelessly for it more vocally than he usually does. But when Sirius lifts him off the mattress again and angles his hips just  _so_ , Remus realises he's not faking it anymore, he never wants to leave this bed and Sirius and the love that crackles between them.

Sirius bends down to bite his lips and to have, as usual, the last words: “I’m the first indeed.”

Sometimes, when things are hot, they catch fire, and so do they.

 

SOMEWHERE IN SCOTLAND, 1976.

Years before, when they are just confused kids, really, Remus, stiff like his limbs are made of hardwood, lies sore and achy and insomniac the night before the full moon. The bed sags suddenly, Sirius crawling inside so silently he must have used a charm. He shuts the curtains, banishing the moon with its bloated face that peers at him through the window.

Remus feels like dying inside when Sirius plucks at the waistband of his pyjamas, but in retrospect, he recognizes it was going on for a while.

It’s awkward and shy and over after a minute. It happens again the next month before the moon, and again the month after that, and then at least once a week in narrow broom-sheds and empty classrooms, behind tapestries and on the dusty floorboards of the Shrieking Shack, nothing done or said during the day, a silent agreement they never dare acknowledge.

 

POLPERRO, 1976

It all started earlier, though, much earlier, by the pond near the Potter’s summer cottage, birds chirruping gleefully, high pines gently whooshing in the humid August breeze, only a week before their sixth year.

Remus showed up after hearing about Sirius’ runaway rebel stunt from James, spending almost all of his three-months allowance on a bus ticket from Wales to Cornwall.

An unbearably hot afternoon, it dawns on Remus, like a stab that spreads horror through his body, that he’d been stargazing the bow of Sirius’ lips, the classical profile painted by his straight nose, the elegant column of his neck, the slouched arrangement of his legs on the grass, annoyingly devoid of any teenage awkwardness. An uncharted diagram of desires unfurls in his chest, igniting the final descent into the depths of confusion.

Sirius nabs him staring like a thief, and Remus almost recoils, feeling unmasked, a silly kid with a hopeless crush on his friend. He expects a flippant remark,  _What are you staring at?_ , or a smug smirk.

Sirius instead, unpredictable as he is, curls his sweaty palm over Remus’ arm and kisses him on the mouth, tongue sloppy and unskilled and utterly intoxicating, until James yells their names from the nearby pine grove. Mouths wiped with the back of their hands, they never mention it again.

Maybe they’ve been doomed from the start.

 

SOHO, 1981

The cusp of old age is twenty-two, inside a flat that used to be theirs but now it’s just Sirius’.

It reeks of foul air and spilt alcohol and misery, all smells Remus is inured to, by now. Is there even a corner of Britain that doesn’t taste like rot anymore? No, there isn’t.

It's nostalgia or loneliness or a last desperate attempt to rummage inside their bodies for a sliver of love.

If it’s still hidden somewhere, they can’t find it, and their well-rehearsed ballet is a sad mockery of before, mistrust and weariness diluting their eagerness to a tired, almost pointless, pace.

If there’s something Remus learns from this night it’s how to open his arms and legs and mouth without daring to open his heart.

 

AFTER, 1981-1994

Under a warm cocoon of blankets, lazy and leisurely, in the sleepy softness of Sunday mornings, they didn’t. They didn’t to celebrate Remus’ twenty-third birthday; they didn’t like catharsis after the end of the war, and they didn’t to fill their loss-devastated hearts.

They didn’t in jest, after bumping elbows while brushing teeth, they didn’t while watching bad telly on the couch, or after the full moon, delicate and reverent. They didn’t in darkness to wash off the poisonous taste of suspect and mistrust. They didn’t in light, teary-eyed after dropping Harry at Platform 9 and ¾.

They didn’t in their bed, tired and domestic, after a long day of work, and they didn’t on deserted beaches during seaside holidays, still young and forever grateful for each other.

They didn’t in the parking lot outside Liverpool railway station, where Remus got arrested for drug possession and gross indecency and had to Obliviate two cops. In Maltby, on the dusty mattress shoved in a corner of the flat Remus shared with other coal miners in the winter of 1984, they didn’t.

For thirteen long years, while Remus was in a love/hate relationship with his own pain, they didn’t.

They didn’t when the moon was a thin smile hung up in the sky, nor in the dark glow of dirty picture-houses.

They didn’t in Remus’ fretful dreams, and even if they did, he pretended not to remember, because  _he_ didn’t, they didn’t, they never would again.

Or so he thought.

 

TINTERN, WALES, 1995.

They both offered their apologies, or at least they tried to: murmured half-sentences, spontaneously brewed cups of tea, blankets thrown over cold shoulders, friendly pats on hunched shoulders.

It’s been proved how even their best efforts are severely lacking, but at least they’re trying this time.

Remus keeps stuffing Sirius’ plate with food and picks at his own like a bird because money is scarce. Sirius is kind enough to pretend not to notice.

One evening, they’re listening to a concerto of cicadas chirping cheerfully, all the windows in the living room wide open, the summer night breeze gentle on their faces like forgiveness.

Sharing the moth-eaten couch, Remus engrossed with the latest issue of _Transfiguration Today_ and Sirius filling the Prophet’s crosswords, is a painful if clause. _We could’ve, but we didn’t._

Their thighs are pressed together, and Sirius’ elbow bumps into Remus’ whenever he writes down a word, and really, the couch is smelly and worn out, but not so small.

Remus allows himself to steal a glance, the sharp edges of Sirius’ jaw and cheeks softened by the blue-orange sunset light, particles of dust floating around his freshly-cut hair. He’s beautiful like only heartbreak can be.

“Oh, don’t look at me all mushy,” Sirius says, grey eyes not straying from the folded paper he’s holding. “I’m getting ideas.”

His voice is raspy and rough but a corner of his lovely mouth tugs upwards, and Remus’ heart jolts like thirteen years are nothing at all. Maybe they aren’t, compared to the marvel that is his endurance in loving Sirius.

“What kind of ideas?” He smiles, turning a page of his periodical without even having finished the previous one.

Sirius shifts even closer, shaking his head, choppy hair swaying a little, not hiding the grin clearing up his haunted face.

“Merlin, you’ve always been so full of shit, Moony,” he says, voice fond and amused.

Remus laughs. For the first time in thirteen years he thinks, _maybe we will._

  


**Author's Note:**

> Vaguely inspired by Stuart Dybeck's short story "We Didn't".


End file.
